Ross Clark

At first sight it might seem like the triumph of reason over ideology. The Times is reporting that Ed Miliband has given way and is poised to announce that he will, after all, grant a licence for extraction from the Jackdaw gas field 250 miles east of Aberdeen. It has been a long time coming. For weeks, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero has been holding out, insisting that more oil and gas drilling in the North Sea won’t make any difference to Britain’s energy security or energy prices. Meanwhile, even RenewableUK, the trade body for wind and solar, has been backing more drilling. On Wednesday, Rachel Reeves made it quite clear that she was in favour of approving new licences for the North Sea.

Reform UK has just made what could turn out to be an enormous error. Its Treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick, has committed the party to retaining the ‘triple lock’ on pensions, whereby the state pension rises each year by either inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is greater. This follows a period in which Nigel Farage had suggested that the policy was ‘up for discussion’. It is easy to see the attraction of committing yourself to the triple lock. A recent poll by Lord Ashcroft suggested that six in 10 voters support the policy. What’s more, pensioners tend to be enthusiastic voters.

Sooner or later it is going to dawn on Ed Miliband and the rest of the government that anger over Britain’s sky-high energy prices is not going to go away. They are no longer going to be able to conceal the obvious evidence that UK consumers and businesses are paying significantly more for their energy than their counterparts in comparable countries. They are also not going to get away with blaming the war in Iran, nor with maintaining the pretence that the government’s green policies are helping to bring down bills. Yesterday it was the turn of Marks & Spencer chief executive Stuart Machin to highlight the issue. Green levies and other policy costs, he revealed, now make up more than half of his company’s energy bills.

Have markets and governments horribly underestimated the fallout from the Iran war, or is it the doomsters who have got it horribly wrong? President Trump’s announcement has rather caught the world off guard. This morning, he posted on Truth social saying that he is seeking a negotiated settlement with Iran and has postponed his planned attacks on energy infrastructure. Many expected a huge escalation in hostilities this week. Could this be yet another example of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), or was his threat to bomb energy infrastructure another crafted bluff – and that order to the global economy will be swiftly restored?

Like Harold Wilson and his 'white heat of technology', Rachel Reeves is presumably hoping that blathering on about AI and quantum computing in her Mais lecture today is going to make her sound modern and positive. Yes, of course artificial intelligence is the 'defining technology of our era' – we don't need the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tell us that. I am sure that £2.5 billion of public money will be useful, but then there isn't exactly a shortage of private capital being hosed on AI at the moment, so the need for public money isn't clear; lower taxes and less onerous employment legislation might be more favourable.

Could there be any greater vindication for the government’s policy of pushing us to buy electric vehicles than the crisis in Iran, which has sent prices of petrol and diesel soaring? That is what the government itself would like us to think, but it is not how the UK car industry sees it. Never mind the pain being suffered at the pumps. The Chief Executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), Mike Hawes, chose yesterday to warn that the industry is in ‘deep jeopardy' thanks to the government’s proposal for banning new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 and all remaining hybrids from 2035. At an event in London set up to call for a rethink, he said he didn’t know of a single person in the industry who thinks that the targets on EV sales can be met.

How many times has Ed Miliband told us that his renewable energy policies were helping to free us from ‘fossil fuel dictators’? Wind and solar energy, he assures us, are saving us money and making us more energy-secure. Then we wake up to find that actually, Britain has only two days’ worth of gas left in storage. If the people who run our gas network were to go on all-out strike we wouldn’t last five minutes It has been clear for a long time that Miliband’s claims are somewhat contrary to reality. If Britain’s net zero policies are really helping to bring down prices, then how come UK households – even before the current crisis – were paying twice as much for their gas and two and half times as much for their electricity as US consumers?

Living longer but spending more of our lives in ill health. That is the rather shocking picture presented by the figures for 'healthy life expectancy’ published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) yesterday. They show that while life expectancy continues to rise modestly, the proportion of our lives lived in ‘good’ health is falling sharply. Between 2022 and 2024 men enjoyed 60.7 years of good health and women 60.9 years. This was, respectively, 1.8 years and 2.5 years down on the previous period for which data was collected, 2019 to 2020. We now appear to spend less of our lives in good health than we did at any time since the data began to be collected in this form between 2011 and 2013.